Learn more about FMWIS intern Hannah Davis, and project, "Walking Lichens" and her main supervisors were Jim Boone and Robert Luecking, with subsequent supervisors being Allie Stone and Kelsey Keaton. She mainly worked in the Insect Collection, which holds over four-and-a-half million specimens. Hannah sifted through drawers of Praying Mantids, Katydids, Grasshoppers, Treehoppers, Walking Sticks, and Moths, looking for species which mimicked lichen. Her "mini-collection" consisted of 106 specimens belonging to 88 unique species. Read more about Field Museum Women in Science (FMWIS) Internships 2014 -- Hannah Davis

Medieval weaponry and youth outreach don’t often appear in the same sentence, much less the same room. Fortunately, thanks to a recent partnership between the Exhibitions Shop and the Digital Media Learning Program, area high schoolers had a chance to design and build their own catapults! Together, they applied many of the same techniques used for the Biomechanics show to realize their own innovations. Read more about A Summer Fling

Contrary to the image of mummies portrayed by the popular Scooby-Doo cartoon, mummies are not monsters, capable of smashing through walls; in fact, most mummies are too fragile even to stand on end. Egyptian mummies are embalmed lying on their back, and so fit easily into a medical CT scanner, which looks a bit like a spaceship with a table for the patient that slides through a hole in the middle of the machine. Peruvian mummies are a different story, though, since they were buried crouching – the larger examples won’t fit through the hole. Read more about Mummies and Cheetahs, in 3D!

The glass windows that enclose The Field Museum’s Pritzker Laboratory on the second floor of the museum give visitors a glimpse into the daily lives of the scientists, students, and interns that work there. Now, visitors can also get a glimpse of the future – a new DNA sequencer has arrived, and its users are busy enjoying its capabilities! Read more about The Future of DNA Investigations at The Field Museum

Nina Cummings, who ably heads our photo archives in the museum shared with me an interesting blog post she saw recently. It was from The Library of Congress and was written by Bill LeFurgy, their digital initiatives manager of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. The title of the blog post was “What do researchers want from institutions that preserve digital content?” Here at the museum we are working through our digital initiatives so the post resonated on several fronts. The opening statement included this: “User expectations influence so much of what stewardship organizations do. We collect and preserve all content primarily to support use.” Read more about What do researchers want?

Properly piecing together a rare early human skull (12,000 to 15,000 years old!) is a difficult task, but Robert Martin and JP Brown are pioneering the usage of medical technologies to give us a better picture of what Magdalenian Woman really looked like. Read more about Video: Putting Heads Together